(no subject)
I've been using StumbleUpon a lot lately--it's a great way to eat up time entertain yourself. :) Anyway, one of my stumbles took me to a page that explained what your nails said about your health. The only one I remember is that if the little half-moon of white at the bottom of your nail is small, it means something is up with your thyroid.
My little half-moon is non-existent except for my thumbs. Hmm.
That's been sitting in my brain, rattling around for a couple of days. Other people, throughout the years, have idly mentioned that I might want to check out my thyroid, since I have no energy and get tired a lot. For some reason, I've never taken it too seriously. Why this one page--that was probably a bunch of hooey--stuck in my head and caused me to finally look up thyroid stuff, I'll never know.
The first quiz I found on possible thyroid problems was...odd. This is the response to my answer to the second question (the first question being male or female):
Your answer was not indicative of a thyroid risk or symptom.
If you have a higher risk for or symptoms of thyroid disease, your answer to:
Have you been exposed to radiation, such as occurred after the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident?
would be:
Yes
....
Okay.
Moving on.
Wikipedia was no help whatsoever, and the other Google links looked about the same. So, what the hell, it's WebMD time.
I looked up thyroid, got a bunch of information that didn't really describe how to tell if you may want to look into it. So I moved on over to everyone's favorite hypochondria inducer, the Symptom Checker. This lovely little gadget lets you select parts of your body, and gives you a list of things that could be wrong with those parts. I picked a lot of things off of "Head > Head", and most of the rest off "Chest > Chest". On my list of "Possible Conditions" was Hypothyroidism. So I clicked on that, and clicked the tab to view all the symptoms:
Swelling in the neck
Body aches or pains
Increased sensitivity to cold
Confusion
Constipation
Depressed mood
Dry skin
Fatigue
Heavy or irregular period
Stiff neck
Pale skin [nah, blame my ancestors]
Difficulty swallowing
Weight gain [nah, blame myself]
Yellow skin
Mood swings
Difficulty concentrating
Muscle weakness
Tires quickly
Decreased sweating
Hot, dry skin
Hair loss
Low blood pressure
Coarse hair
Loss of outside 1/3 of eyebrow [...ooookay]
Yellow eyes
Overweight [again, blame myself]
Weakness
Out of 27 symptoms, I have 11--more, if you ignore the fact that I eat too much and my ancestors hid from the sun (and so do I). When playing around on WebMD, the list of "possible conditions" had a lot of mood things: depression, anxiety, *tension* headache, panic attacks--even schizophrenia (um, no. I think that one is due to the "fits of anger" symptom.).
Now, I know a lot of the hypothyroid symptoms could be normal, everyday stuff thanks to being stressed, being lazy, being depressed, etc. But I'm not the first person to think my thyroid may be behind a lot of my problems, and there's a good chance that one or both of my parents have a similar problem with their thyroid. So I think it's time to hit up the doctor and ask for an opinion from a medical professional.
I just fear that it's a blood test--damned needles!
The good news is, if it turns out I'm right on this, the possible treatments could really improve my life. And yes, they might affect my mood, but not in the same way Cymbalta or Zoloft or any of the others used to. I always think of those as band-aids, while a treatment for a body part malfunction is different...in other words, I wouldn't be going back a step or two in order to correct my body and feel better. :-D
In other news: I got a 93 on my Sustainable Energy test, and an 86 in the class, and an 83 on my Sales test, despite my attendance (both physical and mental) in that class has been...awful. Life is going.